The Kirklin Clinic (UAB)

The clinic bears the name of John Kirklin, a pioneering UAB heart surgeon and researcher. Pei said his greatest regret was not having been able to work more closely with him: the two never discussed the programme, only how the building would make people enjoy being there.

The client was the University of Alabama Health Services Foundation. Planning began in December 1988 and construction in April 1990, and the building was completed in May 1992. Pei Cobb Freed & Partners handled master planning, design and full architectural services, with I. M. Pei and C. C. Pei as lead designers; construction documents and construction administration were coordinated with the associate architects, TRO (The Ritchie Organization) and Garikes Wilson Atkinson, both of Birmingham. Several Birmingham practices, Nimrod Long and Associates among them, worked with Pei.

The site, nine acres over two and a half city blocks on the eastern edge of the hospital district, is crossed by two streets and hemmed in by buildings of varying styles and sizes. The design answers with a plan for two stepped U-shaped buildings facing each other across Sixth Avenue around a fountain court. The first, completed in 1992, was to be joined by first-floor bridges to the second, planned as a later phase. Its high-relief granite cladding stands apart from the brick that prevails elsewhere on the campus.

On completion, the clinic itself (450,000 square feet) held operating suites, procedure rooms, radiology, a pharmacy, 257 standardised examination rooms and a monumental stair, all set around waiting areas treated as living rooms and a 96-foot central skylit atrium that helps people find their way through this very large building. An eight-level garage with street-level shops and two pedestrian bridges complete the scheme. TRO and the design team drew on the building's grandeur to give it the image and amenities of a contemporary hotel.

Opened in 1992 as a "superclinic" for outpatient care, UAB Hospital's Kirklin Clinic houses several hundred physicians in nearly three dozen specialties, from cardiac care to urology.